Discriminatory Nationalism

In chapter 8 of A Biography of No Place, Radical Hierarchies, Brown discusses the result of the German authorities entering the borderlands. She outlines Professor Karl Stumpp’s illustration of German peoples in the borderlands. He is pretty upset seeing how the German people are living. He states, “‘If they didn’t want to perish, they had to knuckle under and swallow the insults or go to cities and blend in, obscuring the traces of their former existence so as not to appear as German'” (Brown, 194). Thus an interesting and maddening dichotomy arises, where there are two governments doing deplorable actions against different groups of people based on ethnicity, religion, etc.- yet, Stumpp can still be disgusted by the treatment of fellow Germans in a different “nation”. Furthermore, Brown discusses how Stumpp ignores the other nationalities facing these conflicts in the USSR, and only focuses on the atrocities against Germans. Thus, it makes me wonder how both of these “nations” can exist at the same time whilst condemning the other? Moreover, Brown describes the process in which the German authorities organized the German Soviets, in a way that focuses on physical appearance and a strange type of biology. This is a different method from that of the seemingly unorganized “inventory” done of the Soviet territories. Thus, in what ways does the Nazi’s definition of nationalism differ from that of the Soveit’s? Is one way of organizing nationalities moreso dangerous than the other? Is there ever a good method to organize nationalities, or will it always result in marginalization?